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Top 4 cost hurdles while doing on premise testing

In my previous blog, I have mentioned how on-premise testing activity brings in delay in an actual testing. In this post, I will uncover expenses suffered by the businesses while doing the same. Let's take a look at what eats away your hard earned money.

·Testing Tools cost

A sizeable portion of your business expense pie is spent on procuring and maintaining a large pool of testing tools, which come with the hefty amount of licensing cost associated with these. Apart from that, these tools require periodic upgrades to the latest patch or hotfix level to bring it to the latest version. These patches or hotfixes may not be available free of cost incurring extra purchasing cost.

·Owning Hardware Infrastructure

It goes without saying that any testing project requires a finite number of compute resources (Server, Storage, Networking device) to carry out the job. However, the challenge is to scale it up in case of performance testing. Ideally, to do the stress testing or load testing, a production like scenario is required which is usually not the case. Even to replicate a production like scenario, business needs to spend a huge amount of money, either to procure the infra or to rent it from the market. We have seen most of the organizations test in a scaled down environment. This is not advisable as it can hamper the quality of testing of the applications under test and may result in few of the defects go undetected.

·Energy Consumption

There are indirect costs associated with the above activities which often get overlooked. Cost incurred due to energy consumption is one of them. Decent testing environments have specific wattage requirements, which if avoided could have contributed to the 'Go Green' initiative that the Global IT corporate houses are vowing to go with.

·Real Estate Cost

This is another indirect cost that automatically comes into existence when a testing platform is required to be hosted, either in house or outsourced to a third party.

Conclusion

All of the above expenses are seen to be an overhead to the organization as it is not directly linked to its business objective. In my subsequent blogs, I will be discussing "how Cloud Computing has relieved business from these overheads and has ushered in a new business model".